As the standard bearer for the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem has never enjoyed a high level of approval from the citizens of the United States. The absurdly costumed, carefully coiffed, surgically altered, and nauseatingly performative Noem, who in my mind is the Cruella de Vil of immigration enforcement, is reviled by the majority of Democrats and independents. Even mainstream Republicans, those who typically favor the arrest and deportation of the undocumented, recoil in disgust when they witness the viciousness and cruelty of Noem’s posse of feral thugs.
So, no one particularly likes Kristi Noem, who is such a dunce that she was unable to define “habeas corpus” to a Senate subcommittee investigating her continual violations of human and civil rights, to say nothing of incessant violations of the United States Constitution and complete indifference to court orders. Last summer, in order to justify the abuse and expulsion of an ICE-arrested migrant, she accused the individual of being a deranged cannibal who tried to chew off his own arms. She has also accused Haitians of eating their neighbors’ pets. Each of those assertions was, of course, a lie. No one chewed off his own arms. No one ate Old Yeller or Little Sheba.
Noem commissioned a $70 million plane; tarted it up like a flying, four-star hotel; and used it to establish her membership in the Mile High Club as she soared through the friendly skies having extra-marital sex with Cory Lewandowski under a blanket so vital to the national interest that Lewandowski fired their pilot for neglecting to transfer it from one plane to another.
She said that the plane—a luxury jet with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, leather-upholstered sofas and captain’s chairs, a kitchen, a cocktail bar, and a bidet—was purchased for the purpose of deporting all of the cannibals who had chewed off their own arms and eaten their neighbors’ pets. Apparently, Noem’s reconsidered refugee removal policy was to deport imaginary cannibals to third-world concentration camps aboard luxury jets equipped with bidets.
You may recall that this was the same woman who thought it perfectly acceptable to deport refugees in cargo containers: cargo containers with no seats, no bathrooms, no food, no water, and no oxygen. Cargo containers, I presume, without bidets.
The lame misdirection about the purpose of the Infidelity Express served as only the most recent example of Noem’s cluelessness. Donald Trump “reassigned” her last Thursday after a series of similar stupidities: She spent $220 million to produce ICE commercials featuring herself—in costume, of course—after handing the lucrative contract to the husband of an associate; she spent hundreds of millions of dollars on deportation planes that were not flight worthy and ICE-mobiles that agents refused to drive; she offered $50,000 signing bonuses to the legions of troglodytes she hired to assault immigrants; she deported people with no criminal records and lied about their backgrounds; she sent ICE agents to public schools to terrify children; and she labeled Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the two citizen protestors in Minneapolis executed at close range by her immigration goons, as “domestic terrorists.”
I believe that, for Trump, the most unforgivable transgression committed by Noem was that she spent $220 million on commercials that featured more of her than they did of him.
In short, the woman who cannot decide whether she is GI Jane, Calamity Jane, or Amelia Earhart is a despicable freak whose removal was both justified and overdue. In an ideal world, she would have returned to South Dakota without further delay. There, she would have been free to don her Stetson hat, saddle up, sling her rifle over her shoulder, light a Marlborough, shoot a dog in a ditch, and ride straight into the abyss.
But that particular journey has now been forestalled by her reassignment to a fake job in a made-up organization invented by someone in Trump’s administration (my bet is on Stephen Miller) called the Shield of the Americas. One suspects that it would have been more accurately named “the Shield of Kristi Noem.” Her erstwhile boy toy, Mr. Lewandowski, has evidently been reassigned right along with her. One wonders if they will be allowed to continue to fly through the air with the greatest of ease, canoodling under their extra-special blanket aboard their bidet-equipped deportation jet.
The headquarters of the Shield of the Americas will be located in Doral, Fla. You may be wondering, as am I, why that location sounds so familiar. Is there some other official in Washington, D.C., associated with that city? Perhaps someone who owns a golf course there?
As far as I can make out, the purpose of the Shield of the Americas, apart from shielding Noem from unemployment, is to collaborate with Latin American entities to stop the flow of street drugs into the United States. While this is certainly a worthy aim, one must bear in mind that most Trump initiatives are more cinematic than substantive. I expect that following Noem’s departure from DHS, we will never hear of the Shield of the Americas again, just as we are unlikely to see further activity from Trump’s Board of Peace—unless, of course, Noem initiates another self-aggrandizing ad campaign featuring her and Mr. Lewandowski, dressed as Cagney and Lacey, standing next to a barrel of cocaine with their thumbs up.
It appears that our esteemed secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, will also be participating as a member of the group. This, in turn, suggests that the primary aim of the Shield is to continue bombing fishermen in the Caribbean without presenting any evidence that any of them did anything wrong.
So, where oh where is Kristi Noem’s comeuppance? Where is the mechanism for holding her accountable for her countless violations of due process, habeas corpus, court orders, civil rights, and human rights? By what means do we hold the contemptible Cruella responsible for the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, to say nothing of the 340,000 people who have been seized and sent, without trial or legal representation, to hellholes all over the planet? Is this how her portion of the savagery ends? With a nudge-nudge, wink-wink appointment to a made-up consortium of crime fighters adjacent to a golf course in Florida?
Given Ms. Noem’s repeated violations of human and civil rights, it seems to me that the best chance to punish her is by making her life a living hell through civil litigation. Civil suits are about redressing injury, and it is hard to conceive of a bigger collective injury than what we have watched unspool on the evening news every night for the last year.
So, the best way to consequate Noem is to sue her for egregious abuse of the innocent and to ask the courts to provide a remedy. She could be sued for brutalizing without cause the thousands of people who have done nothing wrong apart from walking down the street with skin that doesn’t pass the whiteness test or who are citizens protesting the police state in which we currently reside. A number of our duly elected representatives have law degrees, and any one of them could file a very high dollar class action lawsuit on behalf of all of the victims of her terrorism, thereby bankrupting her forever.
I want Kristi Noem to be so broke that she has to sell her pony and her ranch and her Rolex. I want her to be so broke that further injections of facial fillers and Botox will be unaffordable. I want her to be so broke that she has to pawn all of her pathetic costumes: the flak jacket, the ICE hat, the cowgirl getup. I want her to be so broke that she has to sell her flying bidet to rent a bed-sit in a flop house. I want her to be so broke that she will have to avail herself of public transportation and food stamps. Oh, wait… forget the food stamps—our government is no longer interested in feeding the poor.
But none of that has happened, at least not yet, so instead of being forced to defend the indefensible in a court of law, Ms. Noem—undoubtedly dressed as Dinah Shore—will be teeing off at Trump National Doral, with Corey Lewandowski as her caddy. She will probably want to carry her Shield of the Americas herself in the event of an unanticipated photo op, but Lewandowski can carry her golf clubs and her blanket.
